"I don't want to come across as selling." "I don't want to be perceived as being a salesperson." "I don't want to sound sales-y." These three comments trouble me. Deeply. They are all real, and I encountered all of them in the last week. They represent three major … [Read more...]
Deals Stalled? How to Advance a Sale
January 11, 2010 By 3 Comments
In Yesterday's post, Deals Stalled? How to Stop Taking Yourself out of the Sale, I wrote about the danger of agreeing to something that limits (or eliminates) the salesperson's ability to influence the outcome of the decision to buy their product or service. This is another post … [Read more...]
Deals Stalled? How to Stop Taking Yourself Out of the Sale
January 10, 2010 By 6 Comments
Too often salespeople cause deals to stall because they take themselves out of the sale (or because they let themselves be taken out of the sale). What does it mean to be taken out of the sale? It means you agree to something that allows the prospect to move forward without … [Read more...]
An Interview, My Guest Post and Talking Smack
January 9, 2010 By 1 Comment
Interview A few weeks ago, my good friend Joe Sperry and I had coffee at Stauf's in Grandview, Ohio (best coffee anywhere). Joe is a good friend, and a super-sharp consultant on strategic account management and customer relationships. Joe's outfit is called S4 Consulting, and … [Read more...]
C-Level Executives Want to Hear From You. Maybe.
January 8, 2010 By 18 Comments
Tuesday's post, The Truth About Why Salespeople Don't Like Cold Calling, continues to generate no end of comments (both in agreement and violently opposed). A few comments have suggested that cold calling is ineffective when calling the C-suites. Others have commented that that … [Read more...]
Professionalism is about Two Factors
January 7, 2010 By 5 Comments
One of the comments I received from a reader earlier this week brought this idea to mind. It stuck with me. Her comment was intended to elevate the field of telemarketing over telesales. But the real difference in her defining of the two fields boiled down to two factors that had … [Read more...]
Prospecting and The Myth of Mutual Exclusivity
January 6, 2010 By 8 Comments
Yesterday's post, The Truth About Why Salespeople Don't Like Cold Calling, generated all kinds of feedback, mainly falling into two camps. The first camp is the "cold calling is effective" camp, all of whom have had enormous success using cold calling to gain clients. The second … [Read more...]
The Truth About Why Salespeople Don’t Like Cold Calling
January 5, 2010 By 25 Comments
There are two groups of people who cold call: telemarketing firms and professional salespeople. For telemarketing firms, cold calling is what they do. For professional salespeople, cold calling is one tool in an arsenal of many tools (or at least it had better be). There are … [Read more...]
Mistakes of Ignorance and Ineptitude
January 4, 2010 By 3 Comments
The Checklist Manifesto is a new book by Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande is a general surgeon at the Bringham and Women's Hospital in Boston and writes for the New Yorker. This book is a continuation of an article he wrote a couple years ago in the same magazine. Gawande has spent a … [Read more...]
Quantify III: The Problem with Panaceas
January 3, 2010 By 2 Comments
Two posts over the last two days have generated some interesting comments and feedback. The first was a post titled Quantify Yourself. This post explained that sales is not a numbers game and suggested that you quantify your own personal sales metrics as way to understanding what … [Read more...]
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